Timotei Cipariu(1805-1887)

TIMOTEI CIPARIU (1805-1887) Philologist, journalist, and
professor of philosophy and theology. Born into a peasant
f
amily, he received a splendid education between 1814 and 1825 at
the Greek Catholic (Uniate) schools of Blaj, the principal
cultural center of the Romanians of Transylvania in the first
half of the nineteenth century. He was ordained a Uniate priest
in 1827 and became professor of philosophy at the lyceum in 1828
and of dogmatic theology at the seminary in 1830. He was to
remain in Blaj all his life.

Cipariu was in many ways a typical representative of the Romanian
generation of 1848, of
those intellectuals who came to maturity
in the 1830s and 1840s. Like his colleagues, he had no doubt
that the Romanians were a part of Europe and he viewed their
strivings for political and social emancipation as but one aspect
of the general European movement for progress. Yet, he
maintained a sense of proportion, for he was acutely conscious of
the gulf that separated his own "backward" world from the
"rationality" and "enlightenment" of the West. Although German
and French and, occasionally,
English ideas and experience
offered attractive models to be followed, Cipariu and his fellow
forty-eighters shunned wholesale imitation, preferring instead to
borrow and adapt in accordance with Transylvanian realities.

Those very realities, moreover, proved decisive in shaping his
own career. At first, he was attracted to Romanticism and
belles-lettres at a time when the Enlightenment still exercised a
strong hold over Romanian intellectual life. He admired the
works of French and Eng
lish Romantics, and his intense study of
Arabic, Persian, and Turkish languages and literatures suggests
his integration into the general currents of Romanticism. But
after composing numerous love poems and meditations in the
Romantic style, he abandoned literature as a vocation.

Like many Central European intellectuals of the time, he was
guided by a stern sense of moral obligation to serve his people.
He thus imposed upon himself a social mission to rescue the
"descendents of the Roma
ns" from their material poverty and
cultural backwardness, a task which left little room for
literature as an aesthetic experience. Henceforth, his goals
were those of the Enlightenment■to inform and to teach. Besides
his studies of the Romanian language and his tireless work as
professor and administrator at Blaj, in 1847 he founded one of
the first Romanian newspapers in Transylvania, Organul
Luminarii (The Organ of Enlightenment), whose main purpose
was to keep intellectuals abreas
t of current cultural and
literary developments at home in Western Europe.

Although Cipariu left political leadership to others, he did not
hesitate to defend his nation's rights when he thought them
threatened. In 1842 he drew up a vigorous protest to the Emperor
in Vienna against a law passed by the Transylvanian diet which
mandated the introduction of the Hungarian language into all
branches of public administration and education, even the schools
of Blaj. He warned that such a law, if
put into effect, would
not only curtail the Romanians■ intellectual and spiritual life,
but would endanger their very existence as a distinct
nationality. The law failed to gain imperial sanction, but the
passions it stirred presaged the struggles of 1848. Nonetheless,
Cipariu sought conciliation and urged Romanians and Hungarians to
live side by side as brothers as the only means of assuring their
future well-being.

During the spring and summer of 1848 Cipariu espoused moderation.
In March he welcomed the program set forth by Hungarian liberals,
who promised civil rights and representative government to all
the citizens of historical Hungary, as the beginning of a new era
for the peoples of Transylvania. He was convinced that the
Romanians had nothing to fear from the demand of these same
liberals for the union of Transylvania with Hungary, for the new
parliament, to be chosen in accordance with modern principles,
would surely guarantee the right of all the peoples of the land
to develop as distinct nationalities. At the same time he urged
his fellow Romanians to organize and thus to begin the task of
emancipating themselves. But he drew back from revolution and
urged constitutional means as the most effective weapons of
progress.

Later, as the idealism of March gave way to the harsh realities
of national struggle, Cipariu joined numerous colleagues in
sounding the alarm about the impending union of Transylvania with
Hungary. He warned that it must not be
accepted until the
Romanians had been recognized as a nation, as equal in rights to
the Hungarians and the other nations of Transylvania. It was all
very well, he argued, for the Romanians to accept civil and
political rights as individual citizens in the new, liberal
Hungary, but, in doing so, they would expose themselves to rapid
assimilation. Thus, he concluded, true emancipation must be
collective; it must encompass all members of the nation as one.

During the rest of 1848, Cipariu wa
s an important player in the
effort by Romanian intellectuals to secure a solid constitutional
foundation for the Rumanian nation. He helped to plan the agenda
for the national congress at Blaj in May, at which Romanian
nationhood was proclaimed, and he was deeply concerned with
social issues, especially with the desperate economic and moral
condition of the peasants. But he opposed violent solutions,
urging, instead, gradual reform through legal means, accompanied
by improvements in rural educati
on. He tried to win over the
peasants themselves to his point of view in the columns of the
weekly Invatatorul Poporului (The People's Teacher),
the first Romanian newspaper intended specifically for the common
person, which he published from May to October. He served as a
member of the National Committee chosen at Blaj to organize the
struggle for emancipation, and in the summer he took part in
negotiations with the Hungarian government intended to bring
about a peaceful settlement o
f the dispute over the union.

A compromise of Hungarian-Romanian differences came too late to
prevent armed conflict in Transylvania, and as Hungarian
revolutionary armies occupied most of the principality in March
1849, Cipariu fled to Muntenia. But his services to the national
cause did not end. In the fall of 1849 he and numerous
colleagues travelled to Vienna to seek the recognition of
Romanian nationhood from the Emperor and his bureaucracy. But
all their efforts were in vain, for
the triumphant Habsburg
conservatives had no intention of recognizing the principle of
nationality.

In the decades following the revolution Cipariu devoted himself
primarily to scholarly pursuits. His works on Romanian grammar
were pioneering. He was one of the leaders of the so-called
Latinist current, which sought to replace words of Slavic origin
with those derived from Latin as preserved in old manuscripts and
printed books, but he avoided the extremes of many contemporaries
who sou
ght to "cleanse" the language completely of its
"impurities." In the 1860s, when the political absolutism of the
preceding decade briefly gave way to an attempt by the imperial
bureaucracy in Vienna to cultivate good relations with the Slavs
and Romanians, he resumed his public activities. In 1861 he was
one of the founders of the Transylvanian Association for the
Literature and Culture of the Romanian People (ASTRA), and in
1863-1864 as a deputy in the Transylvanian diet he strove for
legislation
assuring the Romanians political equality with the
other nations of Transylvania and recognizing Romanian as an
official language. In later life he received numerous honors for
his long service to the nation. Perhaps the crowning moment came
in 1866, when he was invited to be a founding member of the
Romanian Academic Society in Bucharest, the forerunner of the
Romanian Academy.
Keith Hitchins